I Am A Cat

I Am A Cat may be regarded as a singular achievement of Japanese literature, but I think reading it as a singular work might not quite do it justice.

I Am A Cat probably needs little introduction. First serialised in a literary magazine and then later collected in three thick volumes, I Am A Cat is a wry and satirical disquisition on the contradictions and absurdities of human behavior, particularly of the Meiji-era variety.

Set in a newly cosmopolitan Tokyo, where Japanese gentlemen strut around in haoris and bowlers while discussing the finer points of Shakespeare, the book is an unnamed cat’s fearsomely bombastic collection of wry and satirical observations on his owner, the querulous and perpetually dyspeptic Sneaze (an English transliteration of the Japanese Kushami, itself not a name you’d find adorning the namecards of most Japanese folks, past and present), and his motley collection of acquaintances and hangers-on, including the aesthete-cum-inveterate-confabulator Waverhouse, the aspiring scientist and eligible bachelor Coldmoon, forever on a quixotic quest to polish the perfect glass sphere, and Singleman Kidd, the would-be zen philosopher who keeps mangling his quotes (without anyone noticing).

Don’t let the putative premise fool you – I Am A Cat, despite its cat-narrator bona fides and humorous vignettes of weirdos in Meiji Tokyo, is no light read. From the get-go, the immortal opener, I am a cat. As yet I have no name, is a masterclass in the fiendishly textured prose that invariably loses its essence in translation. And throughout the novel allusions abound to the literary traditions of the Orient and the Occident mixed with long unsalutary descriptions of the shortcomings of the master.

The first few chapters are perhaps the book’s best, as we get a sense of the formula that Soseki is trying to go for, having his lordly protagonist weigh on in that half-naive, half-profound way on the human condition that both professes a deep ignorance yet a surprisingly insightful understanding of it. And yes, having a cat as that mouthpiece is an utterly apropos way to establish that sort of judgemental detachment on society – who hasn’t thought sometimes could be akin to alien emissaries sent to spy on us to root out our weaknesses?

But the charm can’t last through the prodigious length of the book, and from the middle and heading towards the end, the narrative starts to feel same-y and tired. Perhaps it’s the consequence of reading it in one go as opposed to as a periodical, but the book starts to lose that fulsomely amusing grip that it had in the earlier parts and starts to meander into strange and often uninspiring pseudo-philosophical alleyways that are more about the cat pontificating about this and that without bearing on the weird, idiosyncratic characters at hand – characters whose shortcomings serve as both catharsis and cautionary tale.

Perhaps it is that realisation that a good thing might have run its course that Soseki ends the series abruptly by suddenly depicting the untimely and frankly pathetic demise of his feline protagonist from drunkenly falling into a pot filled with water.

But in all, I Am A Cat will appeal to the fan of the subtle social satire, even if it is best not read in one go, as intended.

I give this: 4 out of 5 boxes of candied yam

 

 

Sorry to Bother You

Sorry To Bother You provokes with its daring, even if its execution is somewhat amateur.

Branded by The Projector as ‘the most woke film ever’, Sorry to Bother You is a biting satire of the state of things in late-stage capitalist society. Hardluck youth Cassius “Cash” Green (Lakeith Stanfeld), who lives in his uncle’s garage, gets a job as a telemarketer and discovers that he can do a spectacularly bang-up job of it when he speaks to his victims in his “white voice” (voiced, to tightey-whitey perfection, by David Cross).

Soon, his talents are noticed by higher-ups and he becomes a suit-wearing Power Caller, where he is surrounded with similarly white-voiced people, and asked to sell far more dubious things to far more dubious clients at far more lucrative margins. From then on, it’s a toss-up between which side will win – Cash’s capitalist-consumerist striving and his conscience. But then, things get really weird…

The film setting might be characterised as a weird parodic vision of a near-future America where capitalism has run amok. Giant corporations offer contracts to people  room and board in return for a life of unpaid labor, the most popular show on TV is just a continuous stream of people being beaten up, and riot police are called in every day to escort rich employees through the picket lines of their poorer, unionizing counterparts (with one act of violence turned into a merchandise-spawning internet meme). Later on, there are some interesting developments that launch the film smack into dystopian science fiction, which ups the ante of the satire into something much darker.

The satire, I think, is the best part of the film – biting, ludicrously funny but also very on-point, particularly the ‘white voice’ shtick that is really just a perfect metaphor of the capacity for a way of speech to internalize certain constructs of privilege in the structure of its language and syntax.  Another nice touch is the way its workhorses of capitalism – the sales person Power Callers – wear expensive suits and make their calls in richly-appointed 21st century open offices while their counterparts slog in tiny cubicles downstairs – highlights the irony in how the two lines of work – ordinarily seen as so different in terms of prestige in the real world – are really just the same thing, on different scales.

The film might be woke as all hell, but it’s also a commentary on how capitalism is so pervasive it ensnares even its most studied opponents. Cash, himself, is the manifestation of this dichotomy, but even his putatively woke girlfriend Detroit the anarcho-artist, who twirls signs on the street and stands with the unionizers, puts on a posh accent and peddles her provocative art to rich customers, going so far as to strip herself near-naked on stage and allow herself to be pelted with goat’s blood by catcalling audience members for the sake of art.

That being said, the film isn’t perfect. Technically, the direction, editing and performances are uneven and give off a bit of an unpolished feel. Boots Riley is a first-time director and I think it shows; although there are some interesting visual ideas, such as when Cash metaphorically teleports into people’s homes when cold-calling them (and one time interrupts a very vocal couple mid-coitus), such ideas are not fully developed and that kind of thing sets expectations for the visual style of the rest of the film that aren’t really followed up on. And don’t get me started on the character of Squeeze, an Asian American who might legitimately be the only consistently virtuous character in the film and begins a relationship with Detroit after Cash turns, but who is just systematically dumped when Cash makes good – your typical Asian man gets sidelined Hollywood trope.

In all, though, Sorry to Bother You is very much worth watching, both for its clever satire and breadth of ideas, even if those ideas verge on the unexpectedly weird.

I give this: 4 out of 5 lines of ‘just’ cocaine 

Lenin’s Kisses

What it’s about: In this satire of modern China’s hunger for material wealth, a provincial official hatches a plan to Lenin’s body from Russia and setting it up in his county to attract tourists. He enlists the oddly talented disabled inhabitants of a village into a performance troupe to raise money for the purchase.

Notes:

• This was a ponderous, meandering novel, one of the oddest I’ve read in a while. That it is a satire is clear, and manages to lampoon everyone and everything to do with contemporary China in some form or other. Co-opting a famous communist symbol to make money is a deliciously ironic conceit, as is the image of frenzied prancing villager bumpkins hauling in massive wads of cash as a result of channeling their capacity for productive work into money-generating, but ultimately unproductive, performances. It has its moments of absurd comedy, such as the relentless descriptions of Chief Liu’s narcissistic excesses, or the surreal feats of the Liven villagers.
• As a novel, though, it doesn’t really seem to work. Structurally, Lenin’s Kisses is a bloated mess, with an excess of unnecessary verbiage, repetition, and narrative digressions. It presents flashbacks in the form of extremely extended footnotes, a curious stylistic affectation that, to me, doesn’t seem to have a clear purpose or pay off in any way. It meanders from character to character, jumps timelines, and segues crazily from story arc to story arc without really feeling like a cohesive novel. Essentially, it prioritises its satire over its storytelling. Everything that Yan can find a way to lampoon, will be lampooned, even though it requires a few pages of exposition that are strictly not necessary to the story.
• At the end of it all, I can’t say I really enjoyed reading this book, although I can kind of appreciate its value as one of the rare satirical works that hasn’t been impacted by Chinese censors, mostly because its satire is so universal that its hard to point to any one thing that Yan is critiquing, or even if he can be said to be critiquing anything at all. Perhaps that is its main selling point.

Verdict: Satirical to the core, yet ponderous to read, Lenin’s Kisses is best admired for its adroitness in satirizing the hypercapitalist excesses of modern China in a way that passed the censor’s pen (maybe because it was so metronome-like in its repetitiveness?)

I give this: 3 out of 5 firecrackers to the ear

Hail, Caesar!

***SPOILERS***

Hail, Caesar! is pure Coen Brothers, but it does feel like one of their lesser efforts.

Like many Coen Brothers films, Hail, Caesar! is an exercise in narrative meandering, a slightly absurdist window into a specific historical or cultural milieu – in this case 1950s Hollywood, populated by ever-so-slightly larger than life characters doing things ever-so-slightly out of joint with our reality.

And how apt, because that fits in perfectly with the film itself, which painstakingly depicts the artifice that is the factory-floor filmmaking industry in the Hollywood of the fifties, as told through a series of loosely-interconnected ensemble stories tied together by the tenuous narrative thread of real-life Hollywood fixer, Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin).

Mannix thunders through the fake sets and palm trees of Hollywood, dealing with the myriad problems of production, both above-board and below. He crafts cover stories for actresses pregnant out of wedlock, convinces a fussy director to take on a sub-par leading man for the sake of his brand, and fends off gossip columnist rivals hoping to get a salacious scoop over some of the more sordid secrets of the Hollywood set.

But his most pressing problem is the sudden kidnapping of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) the star of one of the studio’s tentpole productions: Hail, Caesar!, a biblical epic set in Roman times. The affable but empty-headed Whitlock has been kidnapped by a cabal of genteel communists in return for a hefty ransom, and Mannix must get him back by all means possible.

Hail, Caesar! captures a kind of essence of Hollywood – a corpocratic wasteland of mass-manufactured entertainment, policed by a man who embodies the essence of the Good Company Man; studiously Catholic, works late nights, and struggles to do right by his employer, even if it means slapping an actress across the face. Hail, Caesar! is itself a film putatively dressed in the raiments of capitalist propaganda.

It is a presentation of a capitalist-affirming narrative arc, where the Good Company Man finds new meaning in his Good Capitalist Job, and a bunch of wacky, gormless communists get put in the slammer where they belong. The scene of a tap-dancing communist cell leader (Channing Tatum) fleeing to Mother Russia on a ghastly Soviet submarine off the Malibu coast is also part of this, a manifestation of Red Scare imagery.

Hail, Caesar! does lampoon the communists who mastermind the (surprisingly successful) kidnapping by having them be rhetoric-spouting ideologues and ivory-tower types. The pipe-smoking critical theory-declaiming Professor Marcuse (John Bluthal) is a sterling example of this – a declaimer of the dialectic and historical materialism who is completely flummoxed by Whitlock’s attempts to translate his ideological declamations into a more parochial context.

But in doing so, the film actually gives them a voice. Look past the lampoonery and the message actually resonates (although my reading of Horkheimer and Adorno makes me somewhat biased). The film itself is a meta-example of the kind of film that inures you to your place in the capitalist machine. Mannix finds absolution in remaining in Hollywood, producing cookie-cutter entertainment and managing his crop of carefully groomed starlets.  His story is an example of the kinds of narrative arcs that inure moviegoers to “Hollywood values”, the kinds of platitudes that make you buy into the system by building up role-model protagonists that do so on the silver screen.

But then again, the film is a celebration of Hollywood as a historical milieu – the vaudeville set-pieces, the pompous Biblical epics, the celluloid and period trimmings, the Chinese restaurants and the trilbies. It appreciates the era as an indelible part of Americana.

In that regard, it contains similarities to that other Coen brothers film – Barton Fink, which is also a movie about Hollywood as mass entertainment. The difference is that Hail, Caesar! aims to be more subversive in its commentary. Where Barton Fink is about how Hollywood doesn’t appreciate art, Hail, Caesar! is a film – multiple films in a film – that is in itself an embodiment of how Hollywood doesn’t appreciate art – or, rather, manufactures a version of it that inures viewers to the capitalist machine.

It is quite the clever conceit, although on a surface level the film does suffer a little from it. For one, I think that the film’s biggest failing is that it doesn’t quite manage to use its impressive ensemble cast to maximum effect. There are actors in there that are criminally underused – Scarlett Johansson’s terrifically irascible aquatic ballet dancer, for one, as well as George Clooney as the somewhat spacey Whitlock and Tatum as the hilarious tap-dancing Soviet spy.  The film just tries to juggle too much, and while it does so creditably, it’s at the expense of focusing on its more memorable characters – you won’t find analogues to Jesus Quintana or Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski in this film.  

And I guess the flightiness of the film’s many great but underserved characters gives it a kind of weightless feeling, as if flitting from frivolity to frivolity. It makes for great fun, but perhaps by making  the film a sly meta-commentary on the Hollywood tendency to propagandise the capitalist media miasma, Hail, Caesar! might be consigning itself, at least in its potential for pop-cultural appeal, to a kind of deliberate mediocrity – which among the repertoire of Coen brothers films is still something to be celebrated.

I give this film: 4 out of 5 Roman hip daggers

Snowpiercer

A wonderfully weird premise marred by highly uneven execution. Big spoilers below.

Snowpiercer has one of the most original post-apocalyptic premises in film that I’ve come across. It is a premise that is at once dizzyingly outlandish yet pregnant with metaphoric potential. A world where efforts at climate engineering have backfired and turned the world into a frozen wasteland, where the only survivors are trapped in a claustrophobic cylinder of steel and smoke threading its aimless and perpetual way through the icy desolation. Scarcity forces a pathological inequity on society, forcing the bulk of the population to live at the back of the train while the elites inhabit the front coaches in unimaginable luxury, sustained by the cult of Wilford, the mysterious man who maintains the perpetual motion engine that keeps the train moving on its globe-spanning journey.

As a setting, the world of Snowpiercer is a perfect microcosm of human existence, played out on a much smaller stage. Like the people on the train, we hurtle onward on our eternal orbit around the sun, separated from death only by a thin layer of air. Scarcity of space and resources drives conflict in our world, borne out of crushing inequity, just as it does in Snowpiercer. The train is itself a potent metaphor for class difference: a series of gated carriages that play out a long linear hierarchy between lowest and highest. It is only the incongruity of the image of a train containing the last vestiges of human civilization speeding aimlessly across the frozen Earth that causes this metaphor to truly reflect how truly absurd our existence on this planet can seem in the face of the infinite indifference of the cosmos. (It’s apt that I watched this movie sitting in the Economy section of a plane hurtling through the cold darkness of near-space toward San Francisco, one of those rare instances the viewer’s physical circumstances lend extra texture to the viewing experience, like watching The Thing in an Antarctic research base or Gravity on the International Space Station.)

It’s somewhat disappointing, then, that this film is so uneven in its execution. It is almost anime-like in its trifecta of contradictions: a mindblowingly creative premise, a somewhat dull cast with a couple of standout performances, and a muddled narrative lurching to an ambiguous ending.

We’ve talked about how the premise is a good one. The overarching narrative, the metaplot, as it were, emerges from the premise and is compelling on paper. The protagonist, a scruffy revolutionary named Curtis, leads the revolt of the rear-carriage denizens to take over the train. They succeed, at great cost, in reaching the front – but it turns out that their revolution has been pre-ordained, a regular exercise that serves to cull the population of the train to a sustainable level. This culling was necessary, even desirable, to ensure that humanity’s spark would always continue to exist. The film’s denouement is a somewhat anarchic rejection of this arrangement, however – the protagonists attempt to blow open the train doors to escape, thinking that the outside may actually be survivable. However, in doing so they cause an avalanche and destroy the train entirely. The survivors, two children, stumble out of the wreck, surveying the landscape of ice before them, until they see a polar bear padding along in the distance, evidence that life exists outside. This overarching plot plays out well in the setting of the perpetual train. The train, itself, represents the absurdities and old hierarchical structures of the Old World, in which leaders use the chimera of the Other as a means of keeping the populace in check, with the perpetual cycle extending through generations. The only way to escape this eternal cycle is through making a wilful decision to leave it, a circumstance laced with Buddhist undertones. It’s not new – a similar premise was enacted, in a much more muddled fashion, in the Matrix movies – but the movie, I think, executes this overarching plot well.

It’s the smaller details where the film falters, however – notably in the plodding first half of the film, with long, plodding exposition interspersed with moments of deadening violence. The film is marred with a poor performance from Chris Evans, who plays the bearded Curtis and mumbles and growls his way through the uninspired script, exuding little of the charisma or intelligence that a revolutionary leader is supposed to have.

The sole bright spot in this mediocre mess of a first half is Minister Mason, a functionary of the elites and Wilford’s spokesperson, brilliantly played by Tilda Swinton. Swinton infuses her role with a kind of grotesque, stuffy malice, a malevolent and condescending headmistress whose tics betray her fearful distrust of those she considers below her station.

The moment the film starts to pick up is when the revolutionaries enter a classroom of children and their incongruously cheery teacher, educating them on the greatness of their Dear Leader Wilson. That rather disquieting and chilling scene marks an abrupt transition between the industrial dirt of the tail section of the train and the resplendence of the front, and from then on, the film gets stranger, and stranger is better. Evans remains insipid throughout; however, the film is sustained as the plot is set into motion, when hitherto it had largely been hidden from view. And from there, the film picks up steam, and never looks back.

Ultimately, the film’s flaws in characterization, pacing and direction are overshadowed by its visual and metaphorical spectacle. Snowpiercer is a portrait of humanity’s worst excesses, imposed upon it by the strictures of resource constraints. In it, humanity is frozen like a mote in a hermetic bullet of perpetually mobile stasis, living out its decadent fantasies of war and plenty while ever-present death bites at its heels. A fitting satire for the endless march of human existence, one which elevates the film from another cookie-cutter post-apocalyptic flick to something more intriguing, something stranger, almost approaching that sweet spot of the weird, the twisted, and the sublime. If anything, it deserves to be watched if only for that twisted mirror that it holds up to ourselves.

I give this film: 3.5 out of 5 protein bars